Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Designing effective algorithmic components remains a fundamental obstacle in tackling NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems (COPs), where solvers often rely on carefully hand-crafted strategies. Despite recent advances in using large language models (LLMs) to synthesize high-quality components, most approaches restrict the search to a single element - commonly a heuristic scoring function - thus missing broader opportunities for innovation. In this paper, we introduce a broader formulation of solver design as a multi-strategy optimization problem, which seeks to jointly improve a set of interdependent components under a unified objective. To address this, we propose Multi-strategy Optimization via Turn-based Interactive Framework (MOTIF) - a novel framework based on Monte Carlo Tree Search that facilitates turn-based optimization between two LLM agents. At each turn, an agent improves one component by leveraging the history of both its own and its opponent's prior updates, promoting both competitive pressure and emergent cooperation. This structured interaction broadens the search landscape and encourages the discovery of diverse, high-performing solutions. Experiments across multiple COP domains show that MOTIF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the promise of turn-based, multi-agent prompting for fully automated solver design.

Leukemia diagnosis and monitoring rely increasingly on high-throughput image data, yet conventional clustering methods lack the flexibility to accommodate evolving cellular patterns and quantify uncertainty in real time. We introduce Adaptive and Dynamic Neuro-Fuzzy Clustering, a novel streaming-capable framework that combines Convolutional Neural Network-based feature extraction with an online fuzzy clustering engine. ADNF initializes soft partitions via Fuzzy C-Means, then continuously updates micro-cluster centers, densities, and fuzziness parameters using a Fuzzy Temporal Index (FTI) that measures entropy evolution. A topology refinement stage performs density-weighted merging and entropy-guided splitting to guard against over- and under-segmentation. On the C-NMC leukemia microscopy dataset, our tool achieves a silhouette score of 0.51, demonstrating superior cohesion and separation over static baselines. The method's adaptive uncertainty modeling and label-free operation hold immediate potential for integration within the INFANT pediatric oncology network, enabling scalable, up-to-date support for personalized leukemia management.

We investigate the generalization properties of dense text embeddings when the embedding backbone is a large language model (LLM) versus when it is a non-LLM encoder, and we study the extent to which spherical linear interpolation (SLERP) model-merging mitigates over-specialization introduced by task-specific adaptation (e.g., LoRA). To make the comparison concrete and domain-agnostic, we design a controlled suite of experiments in which models embed short numerical sequences and are evaluated on their ability to cluster and classify those sequences according to well-defined number-theoretic properties. Our experimental protocol compares four families of models: (1) non-LLM encoders trained from scratch or fine-tuned for embeddings, (2) LLM-based encoders adapted with parameter-efficient methods (LoRA), (3) LLM-based encoders with LoRA followed by model souping merging into the base weights, and (4) the same LoRA-adapted LLMs merged using SLERP across checkpoints or stages. We evaluate representational quality with clustering indices (Silhouette and Davies Bouldin). We additionally analyze the use of kmeans labels to see if the embeddings encode any other information besides the one we are testing for. Empirically, we find that LLM-based backbones produce embeddings that better capture higher-order, compositional numeric patterns, but are prone to adapter dominance that degrades balanced generalization; SLERP merging consistently recovers base-model structure while retaining most task gains, yielding superior tradeoffs in clustering separability, and robustness compared to model souping or models that were not merged.

Clustering short text embeddings is a foundational task in natural language processing, yet remains challenging due to the need to specify the number of clusters in advance. We introduce a scalable spectral method that estimates the number of clusters directly from the structure of the Laplacian eigenspectrum, constructed using cosine similarities and guided by an adaptive sampling strategy. This sampling approach enables our estimator to efficiently scale to large datasets without sacrificing reliability. To support intrinsic evaluation of cluster quality without ground-truth labels, we propose the Cohesion Ratio, a simple and interpretable evaluation metric that quantifies how much intra-cluster similarity exceeds the global similarity background. It has an information-theoretic motivation inspired by mutual information, and in our experiments it correlates closely with extrinsic measures such as normalized mutual information and homogeneity. Extensive experiments on six short-text datasets and four modern embedding models show that standard algorithms like K-Means and HAC, when guided by our estimator, significantly outperform popular parameter-light methods such as HDBSCAN, OPTICS, and Leiden. These results demonstrate the practical value of our spectral estimator and Cohesion Ratio for unsupervised organization and evaluation of short text data. Implementation of our estimator of k and Cohesion Ratio, along with code for reproducing the experiments, is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/towards_clustering-0C2E.

Bioart's hybrid nature spanning art, science, technology, ethics, and politics defies traditional single-axis categorization. I present BioArtlas, analyzing 81 bioart works across thirteen curated dimensions using novel axis-aware representations that preserve semantic distinctions while enabling cross-dimensional comparison. Our codebook-based approach groups related concepts into unified clusters, addressing polysemy in cultural terminology. Comprehensive evaluation of up to 800 representation-space-algorithm combinations identifies Agglomerative clustering at k=15 on 4D UMAP as optimal (silhouette 0.664 +/- 0.008, trustworthiness/continuity 0.805/0.812). The approach reveals four organizational patterns: artist-specific methodological cohesion, technique-based segmentation, temporal artistic evolution, and trans-temporal conceptual affinities. By separating analytical optimization from public communication, I provide rigorous analysis and accessible exploration through an interactive web interface (https://www.bioartlas.com) with the dataset publicly available (https://github.com/joonhyungbae/BioArtlas).

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

The complexity and opacity of neural networks (NNs) pose significant challenges, particularly in high-stakes fields such as healthcare, finance, and law, where understanding decision-making processes is crucial. To address these issues, the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has developed various methods aimed at clarifying AI decision-making, thereby facilitating appropriate trust and validating the fairness of outcomes. Among these methods, prototype-based explanations offer a promising approach that uses representative examples to elucidate model behavior. However, a critical gap exists regarding standardized benchmarks to objectively compare prototype-based XAI methods, especially in the context of time series data. This lack of reliable benchmarks results in subjective evaluations, hindering progress in the field. We aim to establish a robust framework, ProtoScore, for assessing prototype-based XAI methods across different data types with a focus on time series data, facilitating fair and comprehensive evaluations. By integrating the Co-12 properties of Nauta et al., this framework allows for effectively comparing prototype methods against each other and against other XAI methods, ultimately assisting practitioners in selecting appropriate explanation methods while minimizing the costs associated with user studies. All code is publicly available at https://github.com/HelenaM23/ProtoScore .

Recent advances in large-scale vision and language models have led to significant progress in zero-shot learning tasks. Methods such as CoOp and CoCoOp have shown that replacing handcrafted prompts with learnable vectors, known as prompt learning, can result in improved performance. However, these models often struggle to generalize to entirely unseen categories. While traditional zero-shot learning techniques benefit from various data augmentation strategies, prompt learning has primarily focused on text-based modifications, leaving the potential of image-based augmentation largely unexplored. In this work, we explore how image-level augmentations, particularly those that introduce attribute-specific variations, can support and enhance prompt learning. Our analysis examines the interaction between these augmentations and soft prompt frameworks, revealing their potential to improve generalization. We also identify a limitation in existing methods, such as CoCoOp, which do not provide explicit guidance for learning prompts that focus on semantically meaningful visual features. To address this, we propose Adding Attributes to Prompt Learning, AAPL, a novel method that introduces adversarial token embeddings to decouple superficial visual variations introduced by augmentation from class-relevant semantic representations. This decoupling enables the learned prompts to concentrate on visually discriminative features that align with the target categories. These authors contributed equally to this work. Keywords: prompt learning, vision-language models, image augmentation, adversarial learning loss, few-shot classification, zero-shot classification, cross-dataset transfer, domain generalization 1. Introduction Recent advances in large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP [1], have demonstrated strong image-text alignment via contrastive learning, yielding remarkable performance in zero-shot classification [2, 3, 4]. Despite these successes, such models rely on fixed, hand-crafted prompts that are unstable, highly sensitive to subtle textual variations, and often demand substantial manual effort, thereby limiting their adaptability across diverse tasks and domains.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a severe disease with a typical survival of 3-5 years after symptom onset. Current treatments offer only limited life extension, and the variability in patient responses highlights the need for personalized care. However, research is hindered by small, heterogeneous cohorts, sparse longitudinal data, and the lack of a clear definition for clinically meaningful patient clusters. Existing clustering methods remain limited in both scope and number. To address this, we propose a clustering approach that groups sequences using a disease progression declarative score. Our approach integrates medical expertise through multiple descriptive variables, investigating several distance measures combining such variables, both by reusing off-the-shelf distances and employing a weak-supervised learning method. We pair these distances with clustering methods and benchmark them against state-of-the-art techniques. The evaluation of our approach on a dataset of 353 ALS patients from the University Hospital of Tours, shows that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in survival analysis while achieving comparable silhouette scores. In addition, the learned distances enhance the relevance and interpretability of results for medical experts.